Angry Again? — New York Women Artists and Feminist Futures

Abstract

In January 2005 we met with four women New York artists to talk ‘feminist futures’. It was a cross-generational meeting involving Lenora Champagne and Fiona Templeton who were part of the 1980s explosion of women performance artists in North America; Clarinda Mac Low and Ruth Margraff from younger generations of artists. Also underpinning the exchange was the way in which the artists come from different performance backgrounds and have different styles of work — though if they have one thing in common it is the way in which work by all of these women is hard to ‘categorize’. With a background in experimental dance, Clarinda describes her work as ‘conceptual performance art’ in which the ‘concept is almost more important than the execution’. She works on politically motivated concepts such as what she argues as the contemporary obsession with consuming and discarding. Influenced by the Situationists, she collaborates with others on intervening into everyday life: creating double-take situations in which people suddenly find themselves part of a theatrical intervention (like being picked up and carried across the street!). As a playwright Ruth experiments with language and creates text for theatre in which music is always present: integral to her experimentation is a playing with the traditions of the opera, or the musical, in a way that challenges the more conservative (well-made play) traditions of writing for theatre.